If you don’t try to stop whatever is going on in your mind, but merely observe it, eventually you’ll begin to feel a tremendous sense of relaxation, a vast sense of openness within your mind – which is in fact your natural mind, the naturally unperturbed background against which various thoughts come and go.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
Dogen said, “To know yourself is to forget yourself.” We might think that knowing ourselves is a very ego-centered thing, but by beginning to look so clearly and so honestly at ourselves — at our emotions, at our thoughts, at who we really are — we begin to dissolve the walls that separate us from others……To know yourself is to forget yourself. This is to say that when we make friends with ourselves we no longer have to be so self-involved. It’s a curious twist: making friends with ourselves is a way of not being so self-involved anymore. Dogen goes on to say, “To forget yourself is to become enlightened by all things.” When we are not so self-involved, we begin to realize that the world is speaking to us all of the time. Every plant, every tree, every animal, every person, every car, every airplane is speaking to us, teaching us, awakening us. It’s a wonderful world, but we often miss it.
Pema Chodron, To Know Yourself is to Forget Yourself
There is a classic text which tells of a sitar or lute player who gets discouraged in his meditation practice and asks the Buddha for advice. “What happens when you tune your instrument too tightly?” the Buddha asked, to which the musician answered “The strings break,”. “And what happens when you string it too loosely?”, the Buddha continued, “When it’s too loose, no sound comes out,” the musician answered, “the best tune comes from a string that is not too tight and not too loose.” “That,” said the Buddha, “is how to practice: not too tight and not too loose.”
That should be our resolution for meditation for this year – not too loose but also not too tight. Too loose means that we do not make it a priority and do not structure it into our schedule; however too tight means that we are harsh with ourselves when we fail or it becomes another thing to feel bad about. The Cookie Monster does not have it completely right – we do not wish to nourish our familiar patterns of avoidance by running away from difficult moments, but wish to look at everything that arises in our every moment. However, he makes us smile and take things – and ourselves – a bit lighter and in that he is a good teacher.
Live without shoulds. I could write a whole book about how I should be, what I should have done and what I should be doing, couldn’t you? The world seems to be full of experts on my life who like to tell me what I should be doing. Living with Beginner’s Mind means letting go of shoulds. I’m not advocating living without our own moral standards. I think that most of our shoulds reflect other peoples’ ideas on what our life should look like. We can let go of them.
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